If you believe in the psychology of lack—that we keep seeking to go back to a perfect source—then you’ll probably view every falling in love as a falling into that journey of going back to innocence. To an innocence not dirtied by the games we play to get what we want in this larger chaos that we, cast adrift, swirl in. Khani Ho Yahmu, by Trishna Gurung, hearkens to that primordial need in us: to the innocence inherent in our longing, where we follow our beloved—just as Rumi seeks his beloved, just as Wallace Stevens seeks that one interior paramour, just as a moth seeks an eternal flame.

To say that we will follow—there’s so much of a giving over in Khani Ho Yahmu’s refrain; so much to do with dissolving in the world of the beloved—of just letting go and getting sucked into that whirlpool born of a diving headlong, in which the path the beloved has decided to strike out on is the forsaken’s as well, as if by pre-destiny.

The song Khani Ho Yahmu has garnered more than a million hits on YouTube, and it’s easy to see why. The song allows its listeners to sink into a world, where for once, we can get away from the many petty games we play in order to feel fulfilled through things such as ego-aggrandisement. The song allows us to drift back into a world where we once believed that a line like “timrai maya bhaye pugcha” seemed an indisputable truth. The song is structured like a lullaby. A lullaby is not a precursor to dreaming. It is the dream’s core itself. It’s an overture pulled from within the dreaming into that space between waking and sleep, where we are supremely susceptible to the promises of dreaming. The song starts off with an arpeggio that nestles in its cycles the seeds of the song: it encapsulates the melody that will tighten into whorls that will wrap around us as the song progresses; floating in the backdrop is the haunting wordless melody of the song leading us into the heart of the protagonist’s lament.

And just as we are getting lulled, the lyrics float in—not with a lead-in part, but with the refrain itself: “Khani Ho Yahmu Eh, Kanchha”… I’ll follow you.

We are plunged right into the whirlpool of longing. The protagonist says she wants to follow her lover, Kanchha, wherever he will go. She punctuates that “ma pani janchhu” with a “re”. That “re”, so seemingly insignificant in that sentence, does so much. It speaks of what is supposed to be—of an entwining decided by the fates, as it were. It’s a belief in a destiny unsullied by the more absurd, crueller, aspects of grown-up love.

The whole song is just this mantra-like chanting around that refrain, with very little development outward from the centre. In fact, the song burrows, with centripetal insistence, deeper into the folds of the refrain. The whole song is wound tight, like many lullabies are—and it feels like a lament trying its damnedest to reel back in the leaving beloved. The singer even gets a little clever in her heretofore merely helpless pleas: she invokes the force of love as writ in the past seven lives to insist that she will not be left behind.The detractors of this song will probably say the work is only all ‘sentimental’. Sentimental hasgotten a bad rap in the arts because it has become synonymous with cheesy. But cheesy has to do with exploiting a source that does not have a mother lode to draw from. Longing and ache—there’s no false bottom to that. Longing of this kind, a giving of oneself over to another,is bottomless.

As the song progresses, theprotagonist, desperate, throws in a little more deviousness. She says, “Haata ma samai, sai ghumti ghumai, bhaagai laanu re”. The lover is “supposed” to take her along with him, she argues. Here again, as before, the argument is beingbuttressed by the “re”. As in, it’ssaying that something like the fates apparently have deemed that this union be so.

If you watch the video to the song, the reveal—which we, as listeners living in the real world, know lies just outside the dream world woven by the song—is made more obvious. This is, after all, a song about the all-too-common reality of a beloved’s leaving a lover. And the song forces us to acknowledge that we are like that lover holding onto dreams that keep coming to an end.But perhaps we keep coming back to such songs not because we are not jaded by love but because we want to keep believing love could actually equal innocence. The lullaby that is Khani Ho Yahmu is all innocence.